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'I love plastic idols'16
: Warhol and Spectacle
Guy Debord in 'Society
of the Spectacle' describes a world where all that once was directly lived
has become mere representation.17
This is echoed in Warhol's infamous assertion that he is interested only
in 'in the surface of things'.18
For Debord, the world of the spectacle is the world of the commodity ruling
over all lived experience.19
Commodities are now all that there is to see, if not to exist as, and this
is a vision that Warhol, or at least his work, shares, though with a particularly
different spin. Barthes in 'That Old thing Art' says that the Pop artist
himself has no depth, he is merely a surface.20
Warhol's art and films can be understood as a protracted meditation on
the power or indeed hypervisibility of the surface within contemporary
culture. In this way, the image begins as a trace of the real that through
processing is amplified, multiplies and thereby emptied out so that the
'reality' of the image is more pronounced than the reality of the object
of which it is an image.
While Debord's 'Society
of the Spectacle' is an overarching critique of the workings of mass capitalism,
Warhol was drawn to the mass subject. He understood its seductive power
and employed its resonance in his art and his paintings silkscreens and,
most radically, his films are often discussed as explorations of commodification
and stereotyping in late capitalist culture. Steven Shaviro remarks in
The Cinematic Body that the 'superstars of the films strike us as
personalities so utterly externalised, so completely given over to the
moment, that they, like Brillo boxes or Campbell's soup cans can exist
sheerly as images'.21
Warhol took public images, icons and motifs from commercial culture as
his palette and opened the outside world to appropriation and transformation.
His paintings, which mimic the forms and channels of mass culture, testify
to the enormous and unavoidable power of the commodity fetish in a world
of constant visual stimuli and product overload. His subject is the American
landscape of the new and everyday, the products of immediate impact but
not transcendent power of a throwaway culture. To be a middle-class American
was to have too much most of the time. It was this world of commodity culture,
infinite series and abundance that Warhol immersed himself in and claimed
for his own.
Embodiment
Warhol not only
evoked the mass subject he also incarnated it. To be public in the West
means to have an iconicity. Production of fame was an American industry
and Warhol took icons of celebrity and rendered them more excessive. Warhol's
work in general can be seen as an attempt to extend the attributes of stardom
to anything or anyone placed in front of the camera or canvas. With obvious
irony Warhol, fashioned his Factory workshop as a threadbare version of
a Hollywood studio, complete with its own stable of 'Stars.' In the void
left by the classical star system Warhol introduced the concept of the
Superstar. In this simulacrum anyone could fashion themselves into a star.
Warhol assumes a
world of media drenched simulations and commodity aesthetics in which nothing
can be regarded as authentic because everything is already sort of artificial.
His works reflect a culture devoted to consumerism, advertising, packaging,
promotion and processing. In the 'Death in America' series what matters
for Warhol is that the embodied spectacle of death is presented to a mass
audience for consumption. By taking his images from the newspaper Warhol
emphasises that what his images represent are not at all the event of disaster
but rather highlights our consumption of it. For Warhol, as for Debord,
death in the society of the spectacle, including his own and those of others
close to him, is habitually perceived as no more than one spectacle among
others.
It was not only his
art works that so engaged with the idea of commodity culture; even as he
represented these icons of mass culture Warhol became one of them. Not
only did Warhol generate his work of art as commodity, he figured his body
as a work of art to be sold. He attended every event22
and constructed an elaborate persona based on his obsession with money,
fame and glamour, voyeurism and dissolute superficiality. It might be suggested
that Warhol's greatest Work of art was himself. In this way we can link
Warhol's aestheticisation of the body to the historical phenomenon of the
Dandy epitomised by Oscar Wilde. This phenomenon was acknowledged by Warhol
himself in asserting the strange inversion of importance at an opening
where: 'We weren't just at the exhibit, we were the exhibit.'23
All the Pop artists appropriated industrial technologies in their representations
of the icons of industrial culture, but he alone became such an icon. He
literally became what he beheld. Warhol became synonymous with his era
because his deconstruction of the delineation of art and commerce, which
was more vivid, more prescient, and more thorough than anyone else's, occurred
in both his work and his life. Warhol said: 'I wanted to be an Art businessman
or a Business artist because making money is art and working is art, and
good business is the best art.'24
David James in 'I'll be Your Mirror Stage: Andy Warhol and the Cultural
Imaginary' remarks that all the works from the soup cans and the Marilyn
series to the Ads and the Myths, are allegorical self-portraits that narrate
the conditions of his life as a media icon, the very life they brought
into being.25
Warhol thus aligned himself with complete accuracy with the forces which
govern the world he lived in. He declared a fusion of Art and life. 'By
becoming like everyone else,' Edward Lucie Smith observes in Pop Art,
'he has become unique. And this enables him (more or less) to give up the
business of art altogether.'26
Warhol viewed himself
as a marketable commodity; he became a celebrity model endorsing products.
He put an ad in the Village Voice: 'I'll endorse with my name any of the
following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, Rock
'n' Roll records, anything, film and film equipment, Food, Helium, WHIPS.
Money, love and kisses, Andy Warhol.'27
Juan Suarez refers to him as 'Artist as Advertiser'28
alluding both to Warhol's embrace of popular culture and his acute awareness
of the intersection of the body and culture; the way in which the body
produces culture at the same time as culture produces the body. For Warhol,
culture and economics blurred and he imagined both his art and himself
in the stream of commerce. By mimicking the strategies of the media Warhol
became the master of art as a commercial enterprise. In this way he prefigured
the way American film and media today exult the media fabrication of selfhood.
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16
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and
Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975), 53.
17
Guy Debord, 'Society of the Spectacle' in The Society of the Spectacle
(1969 New York: Zone Books, 1992), 12
18
Warhol in Interview with Gretchen Berg, 1989, 54.
19
Guy Debord, 'Society of the Spectacle', 26.
20
In Post Pop. Paul Taylor (ed.) (Cambridge: MIT Press), 25.
21
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 210.
22
It was said Warhol would go to the opening of an envelope.
23
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
24
Ibid p 92.
25
In Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Jennifer Doyle, et al. (eds.) (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996), 33.
26
In Concepts of Modern Art. Stangoes, Nikos (ed.) 3rd Edition.
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 232.
27
Cited in Patrick Smith. Andy Warhol's Art and Films, 167.
28
In Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1996).
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